A beautiful book of epic scope... Anita Desai has surpassed her own previous high standards

Full of revelations and pleasures

She writes an extraordinarily delicate, lucid English... She is a writer's writer in that anyone who has ever set pen to paper must ask himself just what it is about the writing that makes it so memorable

Superbly powerful... A rich, evocative book

Like all first-class comedians, he is deadly serious

Paul Durcan has a great comic gift

By universal consent of critics and common readers, Faulkner is now recognised as the strongest American novelist of the century, clearly surpassing Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald, and standing as an equal in the sequence that includes Hawthorne, Melville, Mark Twain and Henry James

His mind to him a kingdom was; or rather, a county, Yoknapatawpha. He breathed on it and gave it life, a luminous world of rustics, comic and sinister, of inchoate historical processes and tragic human beings, earning dignity by endurance